Análises recentes de Kåt Tsun

tl;dr: I really like this game. For $15 it isn't bad at all.

I have some issues with it, related almost entirely to the story, not the game itself. I'll grade it in a normal SPAG (Story, Performance, Aesthetics, Gameplay) method. It will be mostly my thoughts on the story element (IMO) issues, though.

=== Story ===

So the story in this game is bad, but in a manner that is so inoffensive I cannot tell if it wants to set itself up in the next game as being satire or serious. I’m assuming there will be a next game, if only to introduce swords and such.

You play as Ethan, a member of a “mobile mechanized company” of the US Army, an elite special forces mech unit that is helping “NATO Battlegroup Parmenion” (all NATO divisions are named after Greco-Roman generals now) with border patrol against the Russian Army. In short, you are a Modern Military Shootman. It’s that story, yes, the generic COD story dudebro game. But this isn’t a dudebro shooter game, this is a mecha game where I fight demons. Why am I being given a minute plus long exposition dump about overpopulation and Peak Oil when I just need to fight demons? What? Armored Core only gives you this much lore after the first three or four games, but this is the real world, not some fake one like PW. Is this going to be a send up to the self-seriousness of AC? Of COD games?

I thought I was being punked or something and setup for a Predator-type situation. You know, the Shootman game turns from a Shootman game to a satire of the Shootman genre by introducing an enemy so unbelievably alien and discordant to the genre trappings that it can’t help but be noticed in a meta-narrative manner. Even if only subtly through acting or mission design, rather than cringe call out. I bet I’ll be fighting the Russians for the next two or three levels as an extended tutorial only for them to be whisked away in a dramatic send up as something vastly more dangerous appears. I was almost right: instead of something like Mech Predator, though, I got Serious Sam 3.

So as Ethan you go through generic border patrol, assert Sigma dominance over your wingman in about 10 seconds, blow up about a dozen helicopters and tanks, and are basically invincible to the weak enemies. Then you go to find a lost US Army battalion in the Mission 2 (“Lost Battalion”) and encounter the demons at nighttime. Genuinely sort of spooky, but I started feeling weird that this was only the second level. Gave me some true Exmortis vibes though. However, in the next level you fight monsters in the daytime, and I immediately can’t help but think of Serious Sam due to the bright background and silly monsters.

By about level seven or so I knew where this was going. It wasn’t going to be satirical. I wasn’t going to hear about the Stoic Military Man having to defend an ammunition resupply. Not because the aliens are particularly tough or able to kill tanks (they are not, in fact, as tanks can survive nearly a minute or so continuously being wailed on by several foes) but because the tanks are running out of ammo so fast that they can’t carry enough bullets.

The satire material here is so ripe and fresh that I don’t think it requires any serious looking, simply tell the story as if relatively little has changed, but keep the stoic generals behind the voice overs and the player character and pals losing their minds: “Why the hell are we invading Novorossiysk instead of fighting those monsters,” or “High command’s ordering us to defend these tanks while they resupply their ammo,” and such. Both of these would be hilarious background satire for the genre (fighting generals more concerned with the long term mundane, as fighting the Russians is eternal in this world, rather than the absurdity of the situation of fighting what appear to be a combination of Lovecraft and Biblical abominations), require no more effort than the actual missions as introduced, and would, I feel, have suited the hammy deliveries just fine. I can understand the author of the game wanting to be more serious with his drama, but that is far far harder than ribbing the genre of modern shooters by literally stepping on commandos with a five story tall mecha, and this is a one man project.

Things that sort of emulate this are done: there is an evacuation mission but it’s soldiers running instead of unarmed people? Shouldn’t the soldiers be shooting? Or at least be unable to fight, like a truck convoy, instead of being commandos with guns? There is a capture-the-port mission but it’s Odessa and you’re doing it to land ships. But it’s filled with monsters? How the heck do you do that? It would surely be easier to capture a port like that before the monsters invaded as the Russians are nowhere near as tough as these monsters are, at least according to the callouts in mission. Something hardly shown in game, where I watched an M1 tank receive about half a dozen blows from a 100-foot tall stone giant with blades the size out of a house for hands.

Also no one asks why the sky is green and the clouds are red. Mysterious.

But I digress…

== Performance ==

I noticed some people talking about performance issues with graphics cards in the reviews I should address it here. This game runs excellently on my system with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and RX 480 at max settings with basically zero frame drops. There’s not much else to say. The game is not particularly beautiful and it isn’t going to be looking like Minecraft with RTX but it is passable by far. The enemies are visible in large numbers and from long distances, due to very light LODs, and you can find dozens or even hundreds of foes on the screen at once without frame drop on anything resembling a modern gaming PC. Very similar to Serious Sam, actually.

== Aesthetics ==

I am still unsure why this game tries to pretend it is a modern war shooter without being +90 hours of dramatic build up before you see your first enemy, like Muv-Luv, but I am not especially complaining in this regard. The models are good and accurate enough for the Bradley and Abrams tank. I never quite got a good look at the Russian units, but I noticed that they were using fat T-14s and some Mi-24s. Sorry for fans of Apache or Cobra helicopters, you get nothing like that in this game, as only Russia has helicopters and you only see them for the tutorial and opening mission.

I do wonder though, why not make it something like the futuristic helicopters the US Army was looking at? Why Chinooks? Perhaps not enough time to make all the models in the game custom, though. The airplane model that you fly in on looks like a Beriev A40 with lifting engines like a VJ 101 in the middle of the wings. It is cool but not especially American or futuristic. I would have expected a C-17 with similar setup perhaps. Graphically it would perhaps have been simpler in geometries, but there may not have been enough references or perhaps the model is not custom made but a stock asset.

So the mechas were clearly the main effort here: they are certainly unique. There’s about a dozen or so combinations for each tier of part, and maybe 15 part types total. All different, so your mech is pretty deep on the customization, about as good as the early PS2 era Armored Cores.

== Gameplay ==

Little to say here, really. Optimal build is to go for as much energy and regeneration as possible. Usually two batteries on your arms and two generators on the legs, with preference towards efficient thruster bottoms, lighter mass legs, recoil reducing arms, and high energy cap/pool torsos. Heads can be whatever you want. This is not particularly necessary to have all the bits until around Level 6 or 7 perhaps, and you should be able to gather something useful by then. If not, do a couple raids to waves 4 or 5 and get 3-6 parts each.

After that it’s dual Gatlings and whatever you want on your shoulders. Upgrade those to the automatic sentry shotguns ASAP and you will be untouchable. Too fast too fwoom.

good sequel

One of the rare cases where a Slitherine published title makes me feel it's actually worth the full paying price.

I haven't played the game in a few months and there's already been a ton of updates, adding different planet classes, keeping the player base informed of modded art packs, and intelligent space alien empires. One of the most requested updates, custom unit OOBs, has also been added.

The starting conditions can be changed so much that each game felt fresh and new. A game where your empire is mostly miners and railroad builders? Yep. How about one where you're becoming cannibals while living in an isolated glacier power plant that's slowly running out of energy, food, and water due to population growth? Yep. A game where you scavenge the ruins of a planetary sector capital, eeking out an existence as techno-miners and salvagers/prospectors, because before the Armageddon War the population was over 20 billion souls? Yep.

Is your army nothing but militiamen raised from levies and volunteers like the DPR? That can be done. What about post apocalyptic bikers riding around on space Harleys with submachine guns and flak jackets? Sure. Motorized infantry in trucks with little light tanks armed with 25mm machine guns? Yep. Powered armor troops with plasma guns, laser rifle jetpack infantry, and atomic shell shooting supertanks the size of a house? Yep.

Wildlife, climate, and terrain are generated at the start of each game, so you can roll dice to change how much water (or local planetary biosphere equivalent), how many mountains (or ravines), and how many flat plains there are. Terrain types influence the cost of infrastructure, so if you start in a planet with glaciers in the equator then good luck, you're not going to be able to build railroads for a while. And heaven forbid your only road or railroad to a frontline is cut off because a migrating flock of giant, 10 meter tall spiders decided to make a big nest nearby.

Anything about the game can be changed aesthetically, so if you don't like the creepy default faces you can replace them funny anime faces. You can also draw new cards and replace those. New backgrounds. All art assets are open and free to modify if you have patience and a raster editor like MS Paint, Paint.NET, or GIMP.

Also you don't need to read the manual ignore those nerds. A true grognard just plays the game and figures it out.

it didnt literally produce for me a mizuumibb-style femboy male wife with mantis blades and a 12 inch cyberschlong

terrible and completely unplayable

This game taught me that all the tanks and MICVs in the world are hopeless against the power of "Sven and Ole in the 5-ton with the LAWs and 60mm mortar".

It is well balanced as of review post date since AIUI it went through a couple balancing patches to tone down like 3 missions.

A solid 16-20 hour game for an average player of Advance Wars or whatever.

>walkman finish tape

it's rewind time

the best part about the game is the kemono friends memes that showed up 2 years after it dropped

also the gameplay is fun

story bad but it's metal gear no one plays it for the story lmao

it's only good with the hf patch

but you need that anyway so yeah

it halo

The rudiments of a game are present. Still. It has some gameplay, some scenarios, a few campaigns, and at least a couple of them (Northern Inferno and a couple scenarios) have some really annoying bugs. But that's not the problem, because that was true in the original game too.

It's mostly the original game. With a Tacview addon script. Because I guess that's necessary. There is also a dark UI, and some really basic Steam Workshop support that is actually badly implemented. The new launcher looks simultaneously quite ok and is actually extremely amateurish. It has no options menu or settings, it's animated, and it just replicates what the old game basically did with a tiny box that didn't take up the whole the screen. It also really hates alt-tabbing. Upon inspection, it looks like what a person who doesn't play video games might think a game menu should be, and acts like it too. When you alt-tab with the scenario selection screen open, it disappears behind the launcher when you click back. So don't do that. Which means if you're reading a scenario briefing or description, and alt-tab for whatever reason, you have to exit the launcher and open it back up to get back to the scenario you were reading. It's really annoying.

I don't know how the TacView stuff works. I imagine it looks pretty much in my head how the game world looks: stuff moves around in really odd looking and unnatural paths and doesn't behave like a fighter aircraft would in, say, an actual flight simulator like DCS. Except with slightly better shapes and airplanes instead of grey dots. Based on the Slitherine preview of F-14s trying, and somehow failing, to hit MiG-31s in geometries that in actual real life would pretty much assure a kill (assuming the pilot was using a reasonable radar mode, like Boresight or PLM, with the AIM-7F, based entirely on me doing it regularly on GAW in DCS with the F-14A) because it is pretty much the ideal geometry to engage a target. But CMANO has conventionally massively overvalued the benefit of countermeasures in air combat (conversely they're undervalued in naval combat and hardkill defense is massively overvalued) and undervalued the benefit of conventional missile defeat measures like notching, beaming, and use of energy and impact point manipulation to put rockets into impossible intercept trajectories. Oh, none of that is modeled in any actual way, it's all still dice rolls modified by "generations" which in turn have maluses and bonuses to other generations that are newer/older. Or for aircraft, as far as I can tell, it just modifies some things like the turn radius and G-tolerance. It isn't really clear what constitutes a "generation" for equipment or aircraft in the database, but we get to see the dBsm of stealth jets and stuff. This is all forgivable since CMANO isn't an actual flight simulator, but it's not really what Tacview is designed to do (it's designed to review ACMI recordings of flight sims for AARs), and it looks weird and is a overall weird choice since CMANO never felt like it needed a 3D view. If anything, it needed far less view of the battle than you always had.

Though it is a pretty creative solution to the overall hassle of 3D views, I suppose, and it lends itself to the developer's strengths.

A digression: I'd prefer if Command had went with a "give orders, based on a rudimentary mission planning, tell people to "launch", and they carry it out by advancing to waypoint within certain time limits and altitude regimes as their fuel states and max speeds allow, without your input in something as basic as "how do fly plane" and the AI makes it own calls as to whether it should shoot ARMs at a radar site locking it up". The training value determines the size of their error bar estimates in things like future fuel state, incoming missiles, and ability to stick to the flight plan or address FRAGOs enroute. So SSI's Waterloo with fighter jets and radios. But it isn't. Flippantly put, it's "Harpoon, but Google Maps". Whatever. Digression over.

The issues with satellite mapping like occasional Z-fighting at high camera altitudes that becomes increasingly common as you get closer to ground, and severe pop-in/load times, are preposterous. The Sentinel-2 map just gets overrun by the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ default background layer and you can't tell what you're looking at unless you zoom out and reload the map. Since the satellite map is also streamed, for whatever reason, from a big server, you're tied to that for the future. So when that ever goes down (I think it has been down for a bit, or at least streaming has been slow, and the map had be moved to a bigger server, but I didn't notice or I missed the move) the only serious, big time improvement in the game is also kaput. Since local game install doesn't even allow a limited granularity copy. Some of us have a few TBs lying around to spare for a high fidelity map on local SSDs to improve load times.

It's ok and it's not worth $80 still. The TacView integration might be good or might be bad but I won't be dropping however much an advanced licence of TV costs because it doesn't seem to add much of anything. It's a God's Eye View (the ultimate issue with CMANO is that you have both too much view and too much control of individual aircraft, really) of some things that may not be needed to be seen, and I'm not sure it's integrated well enough to matter.

The Dark UI is pretty to look at but the overall UI is the same as the last game, but with Dark UI stuff. There is a nice list of additional buttons on the unit status bar which can also be collapsed (what kind of monster would collapse it?) and pushed to the side if it's getting in the way of viewing satellite photos of the world or something. On the other hand a bunch of stuff is half-heart on this, since the scenario description box in the actual game is still Light UI and some other stuff is still Light.

Steam Workshop integration, and Steam integration in general, is a big hot mess of problems. Steam Workshop can't restart scenarios inside the workshop, so you have to go to the actual scenario launcher menu and restart it, or exit the scenario entirely, because the game doesn't know where to look for Workshop files. This is bad. The game hates the Steam Overlay and current advice from the player base is to turn off Steam Overlay. This is bad. A Steam release shouldn't have issues with the Overlay unless it's very old, not designed for Steam but gets released on it later in life, or whatever.

Turn off sound effects as soon as you load into a scenario. They're very loud and annoying.

tl;dr Buy it on sale and hope the satellite map still works. -66% is a good price, but $30 is pushing the limit of what it's really worth tbh. It's not enough of an improvement of the original game to justify full $80. It has enough improvements that you aren't missing anything from the first game, except for an actually functional launcher that doesn't go bananas when you alt-tab. Too many quality of life things are pretty broken, though the game itself seems like it runs OK when it isn't being stupid with the remade launcher.

If the satellite map ever breaks don't buy it. Buy the original game or something since it will probably be cheaper, unless it isn't offered anymore. The original overlay is garbage for anything except the most rudimentary planning and custom overlays are too computationally taxing to deal with, honestly (it might be better in CMO, I haven't tried, because the new satellite images are that good once they stream in). I wish there was a neutral option but the price is really steep for what you get (CMANO with a slightly better sat map overlay and a amateurish launcher) so I'll say avoid it unless you know what to expect.